In 1968, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand’s goals were to make a variety of tools accessible to newly dispersed counterculture communities, back-to-the-land households, and innovators in the fields of technology, design, and architecture, and to create a community meeting-place in print. The catalogue quickly developed into a wide-ranging reference for new living spaces, sustainable design, and experimental media and community practices. After only a few years of publication it exploded in popularity, becoming a formidable cultural phenomenon.

Function, from Whole Earth Catalog

Books, selected and described by the editorial staff and organized in sections titled Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Communication, and Community, were the primary resources the Whole Earth Catalog offered. This exhibition of printed matter in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library surveys these publications and summarizes the history of the catalogue project. The selection does not represent all the subjects the catalogue featured, but it reflects the publication’s focus on experimental ideas in design and technology and the dialogue between theorists and practitioners these ideas raised.

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This exhibition is organized by David Senior, Bibliographer, MoMA Library.

Introducing the Whole Earth

Tulane Drama Review, fall 1966

Prior to publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand was a member of the art collective USCO, known primarily for its experimental light and sound environments and film projections mounted in museums, dance clubs, theaters, and universities. This feature about USCO includes an image of a pinback button by Brand reading, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” He distributed the button widely as part of a campaign for public access to images taken during United States space missions. He believed that a picture of the entire planet would be a unifying force in the management of global ecological challenges.

The release of photographs taken during early space missions coincided with the first issues of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand pioneered the publication and dissemination of the images, putting them on the covers of the first catalogue, in fall 1968, and all successive issues. Throughout its run, the catalogue consistently advertised the pictures and provided instructions for ordering them from the government.

Whole Earth Catalog, spring 1969

UNDERSTANDING WHOLE SYSTEMS

Fuller’s philosophical impact is especially clear in the first section of the catalogue, Understanding Whole Systems. The section begins the catalogue and opens with the line, “The insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog,” and a review of the architect’s work in print appears on the first page. This section emphasizes the concerns of the Fuller-inspired “comprehensive designer,” giving primary importance to the recognition of universal patterns and forms in nature, culture, and technology.

In the catalogue, Brand declares of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s publication On Growth and Form that “everyone dealing with growth and form in any manner can use this book. We’ve seen well-worn copies on the shelves of artists, inventors, engineers, computer system designers, biologists.” This list of professions describes the members of Brand’s circle and is an indication of the philosophical inclusiveness of the catalogue. Books listed under Understanding Whole Systems document the growing ecology movement and the systems theory of biologists and designers, and, as in Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings, express a holistic philosophy toward global issues and a pragmatic focus on thinkers, designers, and scientists who could provide insight into technological change and the ecological challenges of the future.

Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings (Doubleday, 1954).

Whole Earth Bibliography

The first manifestation of the Whole Earth “information service” involved Brand and Lois Jennings selling books and goods out of a truck on communes in the Southwest, in 1968. That summer they commenced work on the catalogue with a group of colleagues under the auspices of Richard Raymond and the Portola Institute, Raymond’s nonprofit educational foundation. They soon moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California, which housed their offices and the Truck Store, a shop selling some of the materials in the catalogue.

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In each subsequent issue, the editors added newly available publications and new listings generated from recommendations by the readership. The Whole Earth Catalog was published biannually between 1968 and 1970, after which several issues were produced outside the official run.

In September 1969, as the catalogue was gaining wide notoriety, Brand announced that it would cease publication after a final, large issue. The catalogue’s readership grew with each issue, but it increased most dramatically with this one, distributed by Random House. Brand promoted the adoption and replication of the catalogue and store format by other groups in other settings; an article titled “How to Do a Whole Earth Catalog” appears in this final issue.

Brand invited everyone who had participated in the publication to join in a final celebration called The Demise Party. A story in Rolling Stone documented the event, with a large picture of Brand presiding. In the party’s final hours, Brand presented revelers with the publication’s remaining twenty thousand dollars and asked the crowd to decide how the sum should be spent.

Advertisement from The Last Supplement of the Whole Earth Catalog, 1971

Supplemental Information

The catalogue supplements, later named the $1 Whole Earth Catalog, update information about previously listed items and add new publications and services that arose between printings of the larger catalogues. The catalogue’s supplements most clearly reflect the fact that its voice, organization, and process were driven by feedback and contributions from readers. Sections of the supplements are devoted to mail responding to previous issues, advocating for products and services not listed in the catalogue’s pages, or announcing events.

Production in the Desert. In Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971

The supplements also document projects sponsored by the organization and its staff and discuss its business decisions, critiquing its own practices and creating a forum about self-publishing, all the while illustrating its renegade, experimental publishing procedures.

The supplement of January 1971, for example, was produced inside the Pillow, an inflatable structure created by the Ant Farm art collective; editors humorously describe the practical issues that faced them, stationed in an inflatable pillow in the desert of California’s Saline Valley.

Conversations evolved with the input of various contributors, dissenters, and instigators. Guest editors and writers—notably Wendell Berry, Paul Krassner, and Ken Kesey—helped shape the spirit of the supplements. Kesey and Krassner edited the final iteration, which features a cover by R. Crumb.

Working inside the Pillow. Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971

SHELTER AND LAND USE

The catalogue’s Shelter and Land Use section addressed the current state of architectural practice and materials research for builders and designers. Visionary architect, designer, and author Buckminster Fuller was an obvious influence, but the section also listed the work of numerous authors.

Domes Are Our New Homes

The May 1966 issue of Popular Science features an article about Buckminster Fuller’s Sun Dome and an offer for the complete plans and license for five dollars. These plans, as well as Popular Science itself, were regularly featured in the Whole Earth Catalog.

Robert W. Marks. The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Reinhold, 1960).

Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, by the 1970s the hand-built geodesic dome had become synonymous with back-to-the-land communities, and publications such as these helped disseminate building instructions. Drop City was a Colorado artists’ community that used recycled materials—“the garbage of America”—to construct its domes.

Above: Drop City letter in Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, July 1969

Right: Peter Rabbit. Drop City (Olympia Press, 1971).

Steve Baer was a Drop City builder, and his Dome Cookbook and Zome Primer (1970) were listed in the catalogue as introductions for the budding builder.

Steve Baer. Dome Cookbook (Lama Foundation, 1967).

Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook 2 mainly highlights the structures that he built with students at Pacific High School, an alternative school in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. Jay Baldwin, a former student of Buckminster Fuller and contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog, also participated in these experimental building projects at the school. Kahn was coeditor of several of the Whole Earth Catalogs, and he used equipment from the Whole Earth office to produce the book. Domebook publications were extremely popular, and they directly influenced the dome-building trend that became emblematic of the back-to-land movement.

Lloyd Kahn. Domebook 2 (Pacific Domes, 1970).

MoMA’s International Council funded Bernard Rudofsky’s research, which resulted in an exhibition at the Museum and this publication, surveying unique forms in human habitats throughout history and across cultures. The editors of the Whole Earth Catalog made an effort to incorporate non-Western forms and organic design into the dialogue about new ideas for living spaces.

Bernard Rudofsky. Architecture without Architects (Museum of Modern Art, 1964).

Designers who came to Expo ’67 in Montreal to view Fuller’s dome pavilion were equally impressed by Frei Otto’s lightweight tent design for the West German pavilion, which introduced his work to a North American audience. The MIT Press subsequently published two volumes of works on Otto’s engineering research, which were enthusiastically reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog’s first issue.

Frei Otto. Tensile Structures (MIT Press, 1967).

Little Magazines/Whole Earth

The Shelter and Land Use section in the Whole Earth Catalog recommends publications ranging from pragmatic instruction to radical visions of architecture and design. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by an international flourishing of “little magazines,” independent publications in which young architects and designers presented their own content in innovative graphic styles and spread the language of contemporary theorists like Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. The catalogue documented this trend and the role of architecture in the counterculture movement.

Architectural Design: A.D., October 1971

A.D. of this period was noted for its Cosmorama section, which reported on experimental projects and exhibitions, as well its profiles of innovative international architects. By February 1971 the magazine had incorporated a catalogue section, describing innovative design objects and tools.

Detail: Architectural Design: A.D., February 1971

Beginning in 1960 the London-based collective Archigram, whose name compounds the words architecture and telegram, published periodic eponymous pamphlets, often with inserts or in unconventional packaging. These two issues give a sense of the expressive graphic styles and collage elements the group used to convey its proposals for future urban spaces.

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Archigram, no. 8 (1968)

San Francisco-based architecture and art collective Ant Farm self-published this colorful manual. The inflatable structure is the decisive form of Ant Farm’s early practice and this publication provides instructions for those interested in constructing their own, with illustrated examples of the collective’s pneumatic designs and installations.

Detail from Inflatocookbook (Ant Farm, 1971).

COMMUNITY

The catalogue and its supplements regularly featured the organization’s dialogue with colleagues who shared and expanded upon its areas of focus. These publications, many borrowing the Whole Earth Catalog format, were often listed in its Community section.

Friends and Relations

This issue of The Modern Utopian provides a descriptive tour of variouscommunes across the United States.

Mother Earth News and The Journal of the New Alchemists discuss practical agrarian pursuits such as sustainable growing practices, traditional knowledge, and alternative sources of energy.

Mother Earth News, no. 3 (1970)

The Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, an obvious offspring of the Whole Earth Catalog, honed its focus through thematic issues. Three issues treat Food, Industry, and Shelter.

Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, 1970–71

Published in San Francisco, Rags documented fashion trends in alternative communities and urban centers as well as the developing genre of ecofashion. It provided a social forum and marketplace for the fashion-minded dropout.

Rags (June 1970)

This Rolling Stone–like rock magazine issued four pages of content biweekly that editors described as the “British Whole Earth Catalogue.” Products listed were sourced from manufacturers and booksellers in the United Kingdom. Readers were instructed to cut these pages from each issue of Friends to compile the whole publication.

Friends, no. 14 (September 18, 1970)

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COMMUNICATIONS

In its Communications section the Whole Earth Catalog traced the rapid development and adoption of computing processes in industry, the sciences, and design. Many publications described in this section, such as Data Study, Basic Graphics, and Diagrams, addressed the new forms of information design and presentation emerging in science and commerce. At this time the personal computer was still years from commercial release. Stewart Brand and others in the Whole Earth community envisioned the PC as part of an evolving cybernetic tool set and a potentially revolutionary technology, democratizing access to information and communication.

Information: A Scientific American Book (W. H. Freeman, 1966).

Cybernetic Notation

Cybernetics, Wiener explains in the book Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, is a social science that reflects on the systematic relationships developing between society and electronic modes of communication, commerce, and movement. In a “cybernetic society,” information is processed and transferred by computers and communicating networks of machines and their operators. These ideas had a great effect on public discourse about the expanding role of technology. The concepts of networked communication and feedback at the core of the Whole Earth Catalog’s vision were linked directly to Wiener’s writings.

Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1961).

Mediated Art

In Understanding Media, McLuhan surveys changes in perception affected by evolving media environments, from early print culture to modern television. For McLuhan, the media environment of the electronic age demanded radically new pedagogy to help young minds navigate these new conditions. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, influenced by McLuhan’s work, promoted experiments in new media as responsive to these shifts in culture, offering new possibilities for teaching and learning for an electronic age.

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Kepes’s Vision and Value book series, which includes The Nature and Art of Motion (1965) and Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (1965), elaborated on relationships between modern art, architecture, and the visualization of information and energy. The photo at the right is a detail fromThe Nature and Art of Motion.

Aerial view of the New York approaches to the George Washington Bridge (Photo Courtesy Project Sky Count, The Port of New York Authority), in The Nature and Art of Motion, Gyorgy Kepes (George Braziller, 1965).

This special issue of the magazine Studio International accompanied the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Representing artists and computer technicians at the cutting edge in computer art practices in the 1960s, it groups sound works, poetry, robotics, digital graphics, and kinetic sculpture as examples of cybernetic art. Works by artist Nam June Paik and composer John Cage are presented alongside visual design from Bell Laboratories and the Boeing Graphics Computer.

Expanded Cinema is Youngblood’s extended survey of innovations in the experimental film scene. The “cybernetic movie studio,” he writes, extends filmmaking conventions through the combination of media techniques such as video production, computer-aided design, and experimental projection and sound environments. In his introduction to the book, Buckminster Fuller writes, “Expanded Cinema is the beginning of the new-era educational system itself.”

Gene Youngblood. Expanded Cinema (E. P. Dutton, 1970).

Culture Is Our Business

The pages of Marshall McLuhan's Culture is Our Business resemble a slide show, coupling images borrowed from print and television advertisements with excerpts from McLuhan’s writing in an extended meditation and critical discussion of the state of commercial imagery and media. McLuhan was a central thinker on the subject, and his writings were of primary influence for a younger generation of new media practitioners.

Stewart Brand described Radical Software as an inspiration, a publication that resembled the kind of networked community of innovators he had envisioned when developing the Whole Earth Catalog. Published in New York by the media collective Raindance Corporation, the periodical proposes various strategies for alternative television and other interventions in mass media. Articles emphasize a mobile tool kit—including a newly available portable battery-powered video recorder—and shared access to media tools. Other organizations describe their activities and announce events in the Feedback section of each issue.

Radical Software, no. 4 (1971)

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Written by a member of the Raindance Corporation media collective and designed by Ant Farm, Guerilla Television elaborated on the group’s media activism and devoted chapters to the development of support systems and tool-access programs for the production of alternative television.

Produced by the upstate–New York collective Videofreex, The Spaghetti City Video Manual provides details about video production as well as maintenance and repair tips for video equipment. Exceptional drawings of a cartoon camera in various predicaments accompany the instructions.

Illustration from The Spaghetti City Video Manual, Videofreex (Praeger, 1973).

Videofreex. The Spaghetti City Video Manual (Praeger, 1973).

WHOLE EARTH BIBLIOGRAPHY

After a two-year hiatus, Stewart Brand reassembled a publishing team in 1973 and updated the contents of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, of 1971. The catalog had received the National Book Award in 1972, and significant demand still existed for Whole Earth material. The updated last issues of the catalog are its most recognized iterations, and over two million copies were sold. The publication’s history is best summarized by Brand’s essay in the back pages of these issues, in which he gives a full account of the events leading up to the initial publication, the decisions that formed further evolutions of the catalogue format, and the people who worked in producing and distributing the books.

Fuller, R B. Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. Print.

Fuller, R B, and John McHale. World Design Science Decade, 1965-1975: Five Two Year Phases of a World Retooling Design Proposed to the International Union of Architects for Adoption by World Architectural Schools. Carbondale, 1963.